This is my blog , it could contain various topics from my own thoughts to computer programming ....

Monday, January 9, 2012

Going Technical , Observer pattern ......

Here I am back again , to give you some insight into another GOF pattern , namely Observer pattern. Let's take a simple example to understand this pattern.

Nowadays phones are very common and many people are using those.We also know that two of most important functionalities of a phone is that making or receiving calls , and sending or receiving of short messages (SMS). Lets focus on receiving calls and receiving SMS(s). Also let's assume that a member of your family has gone to a competition and rest of the family is awaiting the result at home and it is about the time that he or she should either call you or send an SMS letting you know the result.

Now that in this case all the family members are paying great deal of attention to the phone and are expecting to have some form of communication from the other person. In case if the rings all the family members would try to quickly pick the phone up and receive the call , or else if a text is received all the members are eager to quickly pick up the phone and read the message. In other worlds all the family members are sort of observing the phone until a call or an sms is received. Now that I have mentioned the word "Observe" and you must have been hinted about the pattern a bit.

Let's look at the example in the context of the Observer pattern. In this case the family members are paying lot of attention to the phone observing it and waiting for a call or an SMS , in other words all the family members are observers now. If a call or sms is received they will be very quick and will respond to that by answering or reading the content. On the other hand we could call the phone as an object of which the family members are interested in. Also the state of the object would make them to react accordingly. Also the object would notify the observers, in this case by a ringing tone. In essence this is what you should try to achieve in Observer pattern. The pattern is used in situation where a group of things must be notified based on the events which happen in the other. In addition to that the group of things which must be notified would be registered with the subject so that subject can notify them when something important occurs in the subject itself.

In the above analogy the subject is the phone and the family members are the observers. And the attention that is paid by the family members are like observers getting registered themselves with the subject. Also the ringing of the phone can be seen as the notification by the subject to its registered observers.

Let's have a look at how we could do this with some code....
//subject
public class Phone{
private List<FamilyMember> observers = new ArrayList<FamilyMember>();

This is basically what we call as an implementation of Observer pattern , the observers are registered with the subject and the subject would notify all the registered observers when an event occurs in the subject it self about which observers are interested in getting notified. Lets put this into our analogy, the family members are interested in receiving a call or a text to the phone and they are paying a great deal of attention to the phone , when the phone receives an SMS or a call it will notify all the family members by ringing itself.